Hitachi Introduces Fast 4TB Hard Disk Drive.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has quietly started to ship its hard disk drive with 4TB capacity with 7200rpm spindle speed. The new Deskstar 7K4000 hard drive weds extreme capacity with high performance and will likely become popular among enthusiasts this year.

It is unknown why Hitachi decided to utilize give previous-generation 800GB platters and not modern 1TB platters, but looks like the company was not sure that the latest platters would enable high-enough reliability. The Deskstar 5K4000 drive with 5400rpm spindle speed also sports five 800GB platters instead of 1TB discs.

Hitachi GST’s Deskstar 7K4000 HDD is currently available in Japan for ¥28800 ($377), a rather whopping drive even for a premium hard disk drive. As the situation with availability of HDDs will improve throughout this year, pricing of even the most advanced hard drives will get lower.

Discussion

I'de like to have seen this in a 1TB per platter 5400 or variable RPM drive with only 4 platters. But as the article pointed out, maybe reliability was a problem. I could see going with the lower density for the 7200 RPM drive but a high density lower RPM drive would be great for mass data storage. Nice and cool, density balances out lower rpms. Maybe next gen will do that. Guess I'll be waiting a while to upgrade my media server.

Preview

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just as pedro said, I will wait until 1TB platter 5,400RPM drives, or variable RPM drives come about. 5TB drives with higher reliability sounds good to me
being that I use 3 x 2TB's, 2 x 1TB's, and a few 500GB's, I wouldn't mind swapping them over with 4 x 5TB low RPM drives for my storage needs.